Traps and Sanctuaries

In Traps and Sanctuaries, Mark Mahemoff alternates between those experiences of the everyday that act like snares to bedevil us and those that beguile us into moments of heightened perception. With an emphasis on the lives of others, and on how we experience the recognition of otherness, these poems are like the trappings of a furnished imagination, a place of poetic sanctuary. — Paul Kane.

Traps and Sanctuaries views the transformations of time hammering its shape on each individual, through some prickly elegies alternating with celebrations of love and childbirth. In an unobtrusively musical style, he forensically examines life, scouring the past’s smiling photos to bear witness — ‘dispassionate as a coroner’. Along with musings on office flirtations and comical visions of menacing rose-sellers, these poems are cathartically wrenched into being, propelling the poet into the ‘risk of contentment’. — Gig Ryan.

Mark Mahemoff was born in Sydney in 1965 and has been writing poetry for over twenty years. He has spent his working life in the community sector, first working with those with intellectual disabilities and, for the past ten years, as a psychotherapist. This is his third collection of poetry.